May Day! May Day! (the good kind)

by Michelle Y. Souliere 

Happy spring everyone!  It's easy to be distracted when you're doing historic research.  A researcher will spend hours, weeks, months, even years, looking at history over a span of decades and centuries, focusing on specific locales within the state, or the trail left by families and businesses which cut a wide swathe through Maine history.

It is important to pull one’s head out of the sinkhole (or rabbit hole) that it’s been stuck in, and remind oneself that the Maine of today is being created around you, as is the rest of the world.  And Maine, being seasonal in its heart of hearts, has regular cues to signal us that time is shifting and cycling around us constantly.

May Day has cues that I remember being introduced to at a young age.  If you ask my father, he will tell you about my early efforts to pronounce “forsythia,” as their yellow firework flowers were notably the first to burst against the dull spring bracken, each a tiny ray of sunshine in sequence.

By the time I was in grade school, I was in the thick of reading Louisa May Alcott’s books, including Jack and Jill (1880), which painted a very pretty picture of the practice of hanging May baskets, or going a-Maying, in the environs of Alcott’s home in Concord, Massachusetts. 

A kinder version of Ding Dong Ditch, the practice involved crafting paper baskets full of wildflowers, and if meant very personally (although anonymous by nature), the basket would also include a snippet of homemade poetry meant for the recipient.

illus from Chicken Little Jane by H.S. Barbour [1920]

On a May evening at dusk, “just after lamp-light,” emboldened local sprites would hang their baskets from the doorknobs at their neighbors’ homes, knock or ring the bell, and then scamper off in the hopes of evading identification. [Lewiston Evening Journal, 5/3/1875]

This tradition was well-known in Maine too, and on May 8^th, 1880, around the time of Alcott’s book publication, the Lewiston Evening Journal announced in its “Maine News and Gossip” column that May-basket-on-the-brain was the “latest contagion” to infect Androscoggin County.

The celebration of May was certainly not new.  Tracking back a few decades to May Eve 1950, we find the editor of the Bangor Daily Whig & Courier, John S. Sayward, applauding local interest in the May Day celebration.  He knew some folks scoffed at the practice of May baskets because of its superstition-related origins, but countered, “these kindly and innocent superstitions may be regarded as dilutants of essential and beautiful truths which might not else be perceived or generally diffused, or sufficiently remembered or suitably regarded.” 

Sayward saw the practice as a vital way to refresh the community’s sense of humanity and heart, in the wake of the First Industrial Revolution: “in the anxious and earnest and often heartless strivings for power and pelf* in our world, the lamp of the affections is in danger of extinguishment and all the social sympathies of the heart of being dried up.”

*: pelf -- (a)Stolen goods, booty, spoil; forfeited property; also, the goods of a conquered people; (b) property, goods, riches, an object of value.  In use between 1200s to about 1500, decreasing in usage thereafter, from old French root pelfre. [source: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED32776 ]

The superstitious aspects referred to included folk customs for fortune-telling, as well as earlier traditions like the May Pole, the crowning of the May Queen, and Beltane, the Gaelic celebration of summer’s beginning each year.  All of these practices were dismissed as having pagan and unenlightened roots, but Sayward urged neighbors to take another look, and see instead the ties to community.

This is not to say that May Day in Maine is always rosy.  Imagine the odds of that!  In 1867, the Ellsworth American correspondent from Gouldsboro noted the tendency of so-called “smiling May” to play coquette, and switch to a frown as she “dashed cold water on the scheme and probably all her nice little flowers remained in their beds, for fear of taking cold should they venture out.”  Those of us who live here year-round allow her these moods, because the eventual rewards are worth it.  Besides, it’s always good to prepare for the worst, yet hope for the best.  Spring is coming!

from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The May Queen” illus by Eleanor Vere Boyle [1861]

And if we glance back to Sayward’s advice, maybe we should remember that spring warmth can just as easily supplied by our hearts.  In 1871, readers of the Lewiston Evening Journal learned of a large group of young men who loaded up a half-bushel May basket, cowing its petite competitors, “filling it with Shakespeare’s works, and other things useful, and left it on the steps of one of their chums, Fred Storah, who has been sick for more than a year.  After giving the door-bell a number of whirls, they lay concealed to see the result.  The door opened, the basket was carried in, and through an opening in the curtains a smiling face was seen, its owner, no doubt, thinking that he still had some friends who are thoughtful of him.”

With May Day also comes the crowing of the May Queen.  While today local practice may have few adherents outside of religious contexts (Catholic, for one), anyone who has dreamed their moments away to the lyrics of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” understands how marvelous it is that any mere mortal can be enchanted by this “spring clean” for the May Queen.  It’s time to reassess, renew, rethink, replant, and revive, for all of us.  We have made it through the winter!

illus: Randolph Caldecott’s “Garlands of the May Queen” [1884]

 Another May Day tradition, the Maypole, has sprouted on New England shores since the days of the pilgrims’ arrival, and continues even today.  Beltane on the Beach is a celebration that has been held the first Sunday each May since 1982.  Although it is but one of many in Maine, it is one of the longest-lived. 

Members of the Maine Pagan community and happy joiners would flock to the site on Popham Beach each year, creating a legendarily wonderful way to celebrate the end of cabin fever and embrace the better weather to come.  I remember first hearing about it at a Maine Pagans panel discussion at USM here in Portland.  However, the terrible coastal storms of January 2024 took a toll on Popham Beach, and the celebration has been moved south to Cape Elizabeth.  As of 2027 it is still being held at Crescent Beach.

illus: The May-Pole Dance illus by Adelia Belle Beard [1887]

For more information about Beltane on the Beach, please visit:

https://beltaneonthebeach.org/

Happy May everyone!

Labyrinth wanderings in Portland

On the nicest day of the year yet, I finally had a real opportunity to go visit the labyrinth at UNE here in Portland for the first time in mid-April.  No rush, no fuss, just early spring sunshine and a couple of good friends... and a woodchuck committee of one to herald our arrival!

I have seen hand-drawn labyrinths before, small on paper and large in sand, but there is something unique about the presence of a labyrinth built in stone, laid in to the earth before you.  It feels like a stone labyrinth manifests "labyrinth" in its truest form.

Walking a labyrinth is a unique experience too - fully grounding and at the same time intentionally disorienting.  When you stand before it, the center looks so close and within immediate reach from the entry point, but as soon as you set your feet on the path, you are required to suspend your portion of humanity's built-in impatience to complete something, and instead give yourself up wholly to the process itself.

It is a lesson that we as humans must relearn over and over again.  

We are always in a rush, always looking forward, looking for the next prize.  Perhaps a labyrinth is, as part of its intrinsic purpose, designed to thwart and disrupt that constant forward-looking momentum, and draw our attention inward, with the result of gifting us a wider view outward at the end.

We visiting three, one at a time, took a stone from the small pile near the entry and walked it to the center, leaving it there and pausing before turning around and repeating our path back outwards in reverse.

The participatory stones are a recent addition, part of a performance described in small booklets left in a holder near the maze.  [Activating the Labyrinth: A Performance for Two People in Three Parts by Elana Adler and Patricia Brace, performed on site Sept 6th, 2025]

It was good to see that the labyrinth continues to be of use to the community.  In fact, even if the event programs hadn't been present, we would have known the circuit was frequently used because of the way the ground was trodden in along the pathways between the stone rows, the unmistakable mark of the passage of many careful human feet over time.

This labyrinth, now approaching its 15th year, has certainly been in place long enough to give it a settled feel.  For those who have not encountered it in person, it lies in a piny glade behind the University of New England's Payson Gallery, on their Portland campus at 716 Stevens Avenue.  The site backs onto the edge of Evergreen Cemetery, which can be seen clearly through the wood fence running behind the campus.

Crafted of local fieldstones by Ethan Stebbins, a Maine based master stone carver and wood crafter, the labyrinth follows a 5-circuit medieval pattern.  Stebbins' current sculpture/sculptural furniture work is also gorgeous, and unites his stonework into wood furniture, with breathtaking results:  

ethanstebbins.com or on IG: @stebbinsdesign

Stebbins completed the site work over the course of a couple of months during the autumn of 2011.  

The field stones were hand-picked from a gravel pit, in the nearby town of Gray.  He worked from the giant crater there, where "they had a pile of like-sized stone, but I spent a lot of time picking through it." 

"It's granite, glacial till, and they were selected for the right size and shape (flat tops, enough depth to bury in the ground and be stable).  I mapped it all out to scale on graph paper before starting."

The labyrinth trenched and ready for its stones, 2011 [Perennial Stone]

Stebbins told me in an email that he trenched the whole thing out by hand, "Just me and a shovel and pick!"  He worked alone, and each stone piece was set by hand, with a careful eye that is evident in the still-beautiful patterns found in the stone rows today, fifteen years later.

He laughs about the amount of labor now, and how "I never allotted myself enough time or got paid enough back then!  [...] I was younger and dumber.  But it was a fun creative challenge at the time and I was always looking for the more interesting artistic jobs."  Regardless, the results are gorgeous still.

Stebbins may have done the hard digging and lugging himself, but the project did have collaborators: "I worked with Anne Zill, who was the gallery director at the time, also Joe Wolfberg who taught at UNE was very involved."  I will be reaching out to these two to find out their views of the labyrinth, so please do look for more updates here in the future.

The labyrinth in mid-April 2026. [M.Y. Souliere]

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Next up will most likely be another Portland labyrinth -- the one on the front lawn of St. Luke's church on State Street, just a short stroll from the Green Hand Bookshop! (thanks again, Rudi!!)
 

Local low-riding woodchuck processional escort.